This discussion suggests the opposite of your conclusion that guns
tend to migrate from easy to get to high crime locations.
MAIG certainly wouldn't want to use crime statistics to make its case. Maryland's murder rate is third highest among the states 75 percent higher than Virginia's, 47 percent higher than Pennsylvania's, 46 percent higher than North Carolina's and 67 percent higher than West Virginia's. No rational person is going to believe that "weak" gun laws in those other states cause Maryland's crime problem, when they don't cause the same or worse within their own borders.
As it turns out, there is no correlation between a state's crime rate and whether it has any of the 10 state level gun laws the group advocates. In fact, murder rates average 70 percent higher in major U.S. cities where seven or more of the 10 MAIG supported laws apply, than in cities where none of those laws are in force. And while BATFE considers firearm trafficking most likely to be indicated when a gun ends up in a criminal's hands within two years of its original sale, firearms traced by BATFE are 11 years old, on average.
Only briefly noted by MAIG is that most traced guns (70 percent nationally) were originally sold in the same state where they're eventually traced, and that those originally sold in other states generally come from neighboring states, regardless of their laws. (For example, restrictive California is the largest source of guns traced to out of state sources by agencies in Oregon, Nevada and Arizona.) Finally, guns sold in the 10 states that MAIG says are most responsible for interstate gun trafficking, are actually only one third as likely to end up being traced from other states.
